MY PAGES

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

BLOATED SAGA

I
could
not get
past page five in J.R. Ward's THE BOURBON KINGS without wanting to toss it into a shredder.
Clearly, I am in the minority. Some
of her novels
have made the bestseller list of The New York Times. According
to her bio-blurb, there are more than fifteen million copies of her
books in twenty-five countries. Be that as it may, my reaction to
every page of this
bloated saga was,
“I like it not.”
Then I thought
of all the time and effort
it
took to write four hundred and some pages. Never
mind that I found them dreadful. Should I honor every published
writer's work? Should
I plod on in hopes of finding something nice to say? I
don't think so. Subjective as book reviewing is, the only honorable
thing for a reviewer to do is to express her opinion clear and honestly.

So
here is my take on THE BOURBON KINGS—the writing is pedestrian,
the story is mediocre.

Whether
it is a commercial success or not, is not the issue. The issue is the
quality of the work and sadly, that quality is low. To
praise it
be an insult to good writers. That is not to say that you should not
buy and form your own opinion of it. You might like reading
gardeners with master degrees from
Cornell University, people
who have Gucci luggage, and who own property that includes.”twelve
retainer's cottages...as well as ten outbuildings, a fully
functioning farm of over a hundred acres, a twenty-horse stable that
had been converted into a business center, and a golf course.

MORE LINKS

IN THEIR WORDS

"Would you not like to try all sorts of lives--one is so very small--but that is the satisfaction of writing--one can impersonate so many people. " Katherine Mansfield

AMBIGUOUS CHEKHOV

"I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities.''

"Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all."

"Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience."